Persona AI

Persona AI is a Houston startup founded in 2024 by three people with long robotics records: CEO Nic Radford, who spent 15 years at NASA's Dexterous Robotics Lab and led the Valkyrie humanoid before founding Nauticus Robotics; CTO Jerry Pratt, formerly of IHMC and chief technology officer at Figure AI; and COO Jide Akinyode, previously Nauticus's vice president of engineering. The company works from the Ion innovation district in Houston.

Its pitch is a rugged humanoid for shipyards and heavy manufacturing rather than warehouses, sold under a robotics-as-a-service model. The anchor deal is a memorandum of understanding signed in spring 2025 with HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, HD Hyundai Robotics and the Korean integrator Vazil Company to develop humanoids for welding in shipyards. The stated schedule is prototypes by the end of 2026, then field testing and commercial deployment from 2027. No delivery or unit count has been published.

Funding is early-stage. An oversubscribed pre-seed of USD 27 million was announced on 17 May 2025, co-led by Unity Growth and Tides Ventures with Mirae Asset Group and a long list of smaller funds; a Houston Chronicle report later put total pre-seed money at USD 42 million. Headcount and revenue have not been published.